We report observations of atomic, neutral Mg emitted from single crystal MgO during abrasion with a diamond stylus. These emissions take the form of bursts, where the onset of each burst coincides with a slip event often associated with the passage of the stylus over a cleavage step. After the onset, the emission intensity grows gradually to a peak, then drops sharply. Similar bursts of neutral...

A method for analyzing general pulsed magnetization transfer (MT) experiments in which off-resonance saturation pulses are interleaved with on-resonance excitation pulses is presented. We apply this method to develop a steady-state signal equation for MT-weighted spoiled gradient echo sequences and consider approximations that facilitate its rapid computation. Using this equation, we assess var...

Depolarized dynamic light scattering (DLS), dielectric relaxation (DS), and deuterium NMR studies of fragile van der Waals glass forming liquids phenylphthalein-dimethylether (PDE) and cresolphthalein-dimethylether (KDE) are presented. In PDE a new dielectric loss process was found, which can be attributed to the 180 degrees flip of the phenyl rings. The previous finding that the distribution o...

The structure and visco-elastic properties of K2Te4O9 have been examined as a function of temperature, using neutron scattering and Brillouin light scattering, respectively. The neutron scattering data indicate that the coordination of tellurium by oxygen changes notably once the material is heated above the glass transition temperature. This and the associated decrease in elastic modulus are c...

We present a relaxation system for ideal MHD that is an extension of the Suliciu relaxation system for the Euler equations of gas dynamics. From it one can derive approximate Riemann solvers with three or seven waves, that generalize the HLLC solver for gas dynamics. Under some subcharacteristic conditions, the solvers satisfy discrete entropy inequalities, and preserve positivity of density an...

We report here experimental results of yield strength and stress relaxation measurements of transparent MgAl2O4 nano-ceramics at high pressure and temperature. During compression at ambient temperature, the differential strain deduced from peak broadening increased significantly with pressure up to 2 GPa, with no clear indication of strain saturation. However, by then, warming the sample above ...

Dual decomposition, and more generally Lagrangian relaxation, is a classical method for combinatorial optimization; it has recently been applied to several inference problems in natural language processing (NLP). This tutorial gives an overview of the technique. We describe example algorithms, describe formal guarantees for the method, and describe practical issues in implementing the algorithm...

The time-window for processing electron spin information (spintronics) in solid-state quantum electronic devices is determined by the spin-lattice and spin-spin relaxation times of electrons. Minimizing the effects of spin-orbit coupling and the local magnetic contributions of neighbouring atoms on spin-lattice and spin-spin relaxation times at room temperature remain substantial challenges to ...

Although silicon is a promising material for quantum computation, the degeneracy of the conduction band minima (valleys) must be lifted with a splitting sufficient to ensure the formation of well-defined and long-lived spin qubits. Here we demonstrate that valley separation can be accurately tuned via electrostatic gate control in a metal-oxide-semiconductor quantum dot, providing splittings sp...

The optical and material properties of negatively charged nitrogen–vacancy (NV) centres in diamond make them attractive for applications ranging from quantum information to electromagnetic sensing. These properties are strongly dependent on the vibrational manifold associated with the centre, which determines phenomena associated with decoherence, relaxation and spin–orbit coupling. Despite its...